SD targets sewage spills with $12m plan

A major sewage spill into Los Penasquitos Lagoon turned the water murky after the Sept. 8 regional blackout. San Diego has unveiled a plan to provide backup power at sewage pump stations that failed during the outage.

/ San Diego Coastkeeper

A major sewage spill into Los Penasquitos Lagoon turned the water murky after the Sept. 8 regional blackout. San Diego has unveiled a plan to provide backup power at sewage pump stations that failed during the outage.

A major sewage spill into Los Penasquitos Lagoon turned the water murky after the Sept. 8 regional blackout. San Diego has unveiled a plan to provide backup power at sewage pump stations that failed during the outage. (/ San Diego Coastkeeper)

More than four months after the regional blackout led to two massive sewage spills in San Diego, city wastewater officials are rolling out a roughly $12 million strategy to prevent a repeat.

The plan relies on leasing temporary backup generators for vulnerable sites in the city’s sprawling wastewater system while permanent ones are installed by mid-2013.

San Diego plans to spend about $800,000 from its operating budget on short-term leases and just more than $11 million for eight permanent generators from a utilities savings account — assuming the City Council approves.

Momentum toward a solution was welcomed by residents such as Jim Reed of the Del Mar Terrace neighborhood on the northern edge of San Diego. “They have a billion ways to bury problems and I thought this would just be one more,” said Reed, who attended a recent public meeting about the strategy. “They didn’t do that, they got right to the point. … They said ‘We need to have a sewage system with redundancy for the power supply.’”

When the power went out on Sept. 8, two major city sewage pump stations failed because they each relied on electrical feeds from two separate San Diego Gas & Electric substations and don’t have on-site generators. One facility was on Roselle Street near Los Peñasquitos Lagoon, and the other was near Interstate 5 and state Route 54 in the South Bay.

The spills were estimated at about 2 million gallons in following days, but the figure was later revised to nearly 3.5 million gallons. Utilities officials said in the aftermath that the city successfully treated more than 97 percent of the sewage during the regional power failure — and they started looking at options for backup power to minimize the chances of recurring problems.

Pollution regulators at the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board have been investigating possible penalties.

“We have not pursued further enforcement yet,” Jeremy Haas, environmental program manager for the agency, said this week. “The city asked for a little more time to analyze the water quality and biological data that was to be reported in mid-January. We’ll have a better sense of our direction after we review that.”

At the same time, San Diego’s Public Utilities Department is pressing ahead with a proposal to purchase seven 2,000-kilowatt portable diesel generators and one 400-kilowatt generator. They would be installed at four pump stations — the two where the big spills occurred in September, plus two more in the Los Peñasquitos area. Backup generators also would be placed at the North City Water Reclamation Plant and the city’s environmental monitoring laboratory, which keeps samples needed for regulatory compliance.

San Diego is targeting the facilities where the backup power was dual SDG&E feeds, which had been deemed to be enough redundancy before the regional outage. There will still be several wastewater pump stations without redundant power feeds but they are of relatively little concern because they can be shut down, have flows diverted to gravity-fed sewers, or be handled by portable generators, according to a city memo.

Ann Sasaki, assistant director of wastewater operations for the city, said the council’s natural resource committee likely will review the plans in late February and then they will go to the full council. At the same time, the department is moving ahead with leasing temporary generators.

“After a large event, it’s always easy to second-guess,” Sasaki said. “At the time the decision was made in the past, it was thought that … we were OK. But given that (Sept. 8) event, you have to look at the operations and see what improvements you can make.”

Councilwoman Sherri Lightner reserved comments on the specific proposal for when it comes to council, but she said it’s smart to take steps that limit pollution and related fines.

“We need to provide coverage as soon as possible so that we are prepared for any contingency,” said Lightner, whose district included one of the spills. “I made a promise that I would do everything in my power to make sure this would never happen again. This investment makes good on that promise.”